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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29366736">The Fan in the Glass Case</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severa/pseuds/loveyou-x3000'>loveyou-x3000 (Severa)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>20th Century Modern AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cowgirl, Day of Love, Dream World, F/M, Kagura's Fan, Kanna's Mirror - Freeform, SessKag BroTP, Smut, Vanilla, inukag - Freeform, outdoor smut, pre-WWII, sesskagu, wildflowers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 05:07:49</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,501</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29366736</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Severa/pseuds/loveyou-x3000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In the search for one remnant of Naraku, Sesshomaru finds two.</p><p>  <a href="https://hopidoodle.tumblr.com/post/643108211765968896/a-dream-of-eternity-to-go-along-with-the">Artwork by @hopidoodle.</a></p><p>
  <i>Nominated Best Non-Canon Pairing, Feudal Connection Awards, Q2 2021</i>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Higurashi Kagome/InuYasha, Kagura/Sesshoumaru (InuYasha)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Inuyasha Day of Love 2021</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Fan in the Glass Case</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The summer heat was stifling. </p><p>Even for Sesshomaru, for whom such things usually went unnoticed, the heat seemed particularly oppressive. It wasn’t so insistent that he was in any imminent danger of sweating, of course, but within this crowded lobby the warmth had a very singular effect on its human inhabitants: a profuse increase in body odor, which swirled in an offensive stench of unwashed bodies and poorly chosen cologne.</p><p>The changing world was not one that was accommodating to his kind. Gone were the days of the warring states and the restorations. Where there had once been clear skies and untraveled roads, there were now sprawling cities; buildings that endeavored to scrape the clouds, electric lines drawn between them and the standing street poles like spider’s silk, their black cords webbed across old cities that were rife with modern, blockish architecture. Old as he was, Sesshomaru was accustomed to humanity’s curious habit of changing drastically from one moment to the next, never staying too long in any moment, but he had never seen such rapid advances before. It was in their nature to be so quick-moving, he supposed; their lives were fleeting and so their progress was equally swift, lest they condemned themselves to an otherwise meaningless existence.</p><p>Still, the wonders of their technology outshined even the most adventurous strides his own kind.</p><p>The world of lesser yokai was summarily extinct. Like the mortals that had dredged among them, the weak had perished by way of conflict and turmoil, lost to the warring ages past. What remained were those yokai who were more ethereal, less tangible than the former: unseen spirits of the forest or the sea, perhaps, and the flighting creatures of the sky and fire; the drifting sirens that wandered the worlds inbetween and the light-starved beast of the Beyond. There were also those like himself: daiyokai and the best of the yokai middle class, all since converged under the last ruling classes of their kind.</p><p>Of those, the House of the Moon still reigned strongest. And steeped in tradition as they were - as all daiyokai were, it seemed - Sesshomaru was perhaps the most progressive of them all. The most pliable to the changing times.</p><p>But he was only as pliable as a rock was to a river’s current. </p><p>Change took time. Though he now counted the hanyo stain upon his house as a legitimate brother (and through him, an ageless priestess as a sister-in-law), there were certain things that kept Sesshomaru drawn to his past. Memories and reminders that reached through his skull and snared his mind, tethering him to a time that was better forgotten. He, like all immortals, knew it was unwise to fixate on what had already passed by. That it was better to remember the beginnings of things rather than their ends. </p><p>But he had never mastered that particular skill.</p><p>The past had always haunted him. His father’s death, for instabce, was something he mulled over even to this day. Though he was far flung past the power of the former Inu no Taisho, who had been as legendary as he had been monstrous, he was not yet older than him; and the shadow of his age long outlived his death. The depths of his father’s wisdom had always been a strange, unfathomable thing—and though he was stronger than him, could he ever surpass him in his knowledge?</p><p>The memory of it lay before him like a sea, churning against iron shores, and now he wondered if he should have spent more time minding the old man’s musings than demanding the secrets of his power and strength. What would the Inu no Taisho say, if he’d lived to see him chasing relics in this day and age? His penchant for strange, powerful things had never been a secret—but these relics he chased were hardly such. Was it in his own interest that he pried into every dark recess of this modern age to uncover the secrets of his past, or was it in the interest of all? To keep human hands away from things that far outclassed them? </p><p>Or was it simply some desperate attempt to remind himself of the age of yokai? When his kind, above all else, had ruled unequivocally?</p><p>Standing beneath a rotating fan that clicked unevenly with every lazy cycle, Sesshomaru folded his arms and forced those thoughts away, holding his breath against the growing stench in the room. His purpose here wasn’t introspection. </p><p>If Kagome’s sources were correct, there was a relic here among the fodder that was worth taking off the market.</p><p>The remnants of Kanna’s mirror.</p><p>But as for Kagome; she was an oddity in his life. By being the wife of his half-brother, she was his half-sister by right, but that gave her none of their agelessness. There was nothing any yokai or hanyo could do to stop a human’s aging short of possessing them — and yet still she remained, completely unchanged from her return, hovering endlessly in the age of young adulthood. </p><p>He had confronted InuYasha about it, once. When Rin had nearly died in childbirth, bringing Kohaku’s first and only daughter into the world, he had been… out of sorts. Unlike himself. Assuming that the half-breed must have found some way to cheat death, he had demanded answers right then and there. Cheating death was not unheard of. Their lord father had proven that much. But alas, InuYasha hadn’t been able to give him an answer. It was Kagome instead who interrupted their conversation, emerging from Rin’s birthing room with blood still on her hands to lead him away from the village. To this day he still remembered watching her pick flakes of clotted blood out from underneath her nails, regaling him with the strange story of her life while seated on the edge of the rickety well that had determined her fate.</p><p>It was a strange tale. But Sesshomaru had lived stranger.</p><p>On the word of a dead yokai-celestial, Kagome believed herself to be suspended outside of time. Unaffected by its passing. Perhaps she might begin to age again in the calendar year of 2000, but no one could be certain. Her future - her past - might return her to normalcy when she returned to it. It almost might not. But until then, she would remain as she was, and she intended to spend every single year she had at InuYasha’s side.</p><p>That was the first day in which he had counted her among his most valuable allies. Timeless as she was - and so dreadfully<em> informed </em>, like no seer or oracle could hope to be, she was invaluable. With that in mind, they had formed a strange friendship.</p><p>Now they simply tried to meld this new world with their own, and to keep the relics of the past from destroying the future. With Kagome’s careful eye upon the activities of the collector’s market, as well as his own, they plucked the items of the bygone ages out of humankind’s hands one by one. Money was no issue; not when you were armed with knowledge of the coming ages as she was.</p><p>Finally, a tinny-sounding bell chimed and pulled Sesshomaru out of his thoughts, his attention flicking towards the closed doors of the showing room. He was glad to be done with the waiting. Many among these wretched numbers had recognized him— and despaired, he imagined, knowing that he never lost an item he set his sights on. They would be watching him. Gauging what was worth pursuing and not at his lead. Never brave enough to approach him, of course; but following his lead all the same.</p><p>The doors opened and Sesshomaru was glad, at the very least, for the clean air that wafted from within. He allowed the crowd to enter first, not wanting to be caught up in the throng of well-dressed, western-styled men who were eager to see the room’s treasures, their wives and mistresses tittering behind them as they trailed along in their lavish kimono. </p><p>How restless they were, Sesshomaru mused. How insatiable. While he stood back and watched them scramble, clad in the fashions of foreign lands, he remained as the same as he ever had, one of the few among their numbers who still donned the traditional garb, marked with the flowers of his crest. But it hardly mattered. He already stood out strangely enough from the crowd with his hair and his markings, and so there was no point in attempting to match their ever-changing styles. No matter how many outfits and tailors Kagome had delivered to his home.</p><p>Once the doors were clear again and the last of the stragglers had entered, Sesshomaru finally made his way into the room, striding silent across polished floors. This room was perhaps twice the size of the last and had matching oak doors on its opposite end, but they remained closed, barring people entry from the auctioneering room while they had time to pursue the items that would soon be for sale. Many portraits, paintings, and ink scrolls lined the clean walls, of which many seemed to be of a questionable authenticity, but Sesshomaru’s attention did not linger on them; what mattered more were the pedestals and the glass cases atop them, sitting scattered across the room like playing pieces on a gameboard. </p><p>Because somewhere within them, he could sense the black dread of an aura that made his stomach curl and his blood thicken.</p><p>
  <em>Naraku. </em>
</p><p>Crossing his arms in flower-embroidered sleeves, Sesshomaru stopped a few paces beyond the threshold, ignoring the stolen glances his way and instead training his eyes upon the pedestals. There was an old sword - <em>useless</em> - and a trinket box overflowing with pearl jewelry in the center, as well as a few scrolls stacked together in various collections between them and the walls. All irrelevant. All normal. </p><p>Until his eyes caught the glimmer of silver glass.</p><p>Between two hanging scrolls that featured noblewomen and courtesans of a bygone era, a broken mirror hung. It was as he remembered it: a blue-silver circular frame, as wide and tall as a young child’s chest, with four decorative corners that pointed like the directions of a compass. The polished glass that should fill its center was gone, shattered and lost to the ages; and yet still there were shards clinging to the edges in some spots, slivers of silver that simmered with blurred power. </p><p>Once, Naraku had given him two shards of this very mirror. He could see where they’d been broken and plucked free from one of the larger panes of broken glass. Then, he had been told they were the last of the child’s weapon, but now he wondered what the purpose of that lie had been. Had Naraku hoped to keep the rest back as a last resort? Or had Byakuya lied to his creator, leaving the last remnants of Kanna to the whims of fate instead? </p><p>Whatever Kagura’s replacement had intended didn’t matter, Sesshomaru supposed. Naraku was dead. By the end of the day he would have this mirror in hand, and by nightfall it would be destroyed. Whatever was left of that abomination had no business existing any longer—regardless of whom it had once belonged to, it had no place in this modern world. And though he pitied this child soldier of Naraku’s, that alone would not deter him from seeing her mirror broken on Tessaiga’s blade.</p><p>Taking note of the item number and ignoring the rest of the placard completely, Sesshomaru turned his back on Kanna’s mirror, moving to take a turn around the room and cast a cursory glance around for anything else of interest. It appeared that there was little worth considering. While there was more authenticity among these items than most could appreciate, he had no need for the clutter they would bring; the house of his forefathers had plenty of relics of its own. And so he continued, pretending to care about some items here and there; scrutinizing their meager worth against the prices he thought they might fetch, dispassionate all the while. Passing by the glass cases with a sense of boredom, wanting nothing more than to be done with this rabble, seeking a free spot in which to wait out the rest of his time alone and—</p><p>—stopping dead in his tracks in the middle of the room.</p><p>A few people muttered to see him so brazenly stopped. Sesshomaru didn’t hear them. He was too busy warring with the sudden onslaught of scents that had just assaulted him to care. </p><p>To his right there were wildflowers—or the scent of them, anyway. Muted though they were in the glass case beside him, he detected them nonetheless, flooded by the sweet fragrance of springtime buds that had him reeling backwards in time—back into rage and horror, into unbridled fury at the prospect that Naraku had—</p><p>
  <em>A heart beat in her chest. But it was slow. Sluggish. Poisoned. </em>
</p><p>It was his loathsome stench that assaulted him next; Naraku’s scent. Miasma. Black clouds and blacker thoughts, all twisted up with the scents of a hundred other demons. Dread and hate, brimstone and sludge. Blood.</p><p>
  <em>She was dying. </em>
</p><p>But there was an edge to it; something more than just him. Like the scent of Tessaiga’s cutting winds, it was bright and lightning-gold, overflowing with want— with <em>hope</em>. With white-hot determination.</p><p>With sorrow.</p><p>
  <em>Tenseiga lay silent beneath his hand. </em>
</p><p>Sesshomaru broke his statuesque silence with a chilling sort of dread, turning his head just slightly, casting his amber gaze down to the pedestal. He steeled himself against the oncoming storm. Tried to tell himself that it was impossible; that she was gone and it couldn’t be her—</p><p>
  <em>The winds converged. Coalesced. Flower petals flurried around him in a beautiful cyclone, wisps of miasma curling among their redden blades. The wind returned to her... </em>
</p><p>But it was.</p><p>In search of one remnant of Naraku, he instead found two.</p><p>༻❁༺</p><p>Kagura’s fan weighed heavy in his hand.</p><p>Upon giving Kanna’s mirror to Kagome and InuYasha, he’d not told them what else he’d found. He simply left them with the shattered remnants of the child’s mirror, knowing that they would either decide to destroy it - as they should - or keep it out of misplaced sentiment. An avenue he would have criticised them for, once. But now… Now it was a different matter.</p><p>Sitting in the candlelight of his rooms, Sesshomaru stared down at the fan in his hand and considered whether or not he was willing to be a hypocrite.</p><p>Kagura’s fan looked much the same as it had the last time he’d seen it. But time had taken its toll. The auction house claimed it was a “miraculously preserved” fan found at the bottom of a lake, extracted from the depths by some unsuspecting fishermen. But the water had damaged it — there was no longer a lacquered shine to its wooden ends and the thick paper had weathered to a murky green and yellow undertone. Its maroon stripes had been dulled to a thick, clotted shade of red. </p><p>And yet it still smelled like her. Like her death and those bloody flower petals. Somewhere deep within its core, her powers remained, unchanged by the ages.</p><p>His claws twitched uncertainly against the browned paper. It would be nothing to dissolve it with his poison. Whatever yoki remained hidden within it wasn’t strong enough to withstand him and it would crumble in an instant. It would be easy. And it would be <em>right. </em> </p><p>In the end, there had been very little he could do for her except to watch her die. Tenseiga could not heal a body so far gone. And this fan—it was just a bauble. A memory. An accessory. No more Kagura than Tessaiga and Tenseiga were his own father.</p><p>Smoothing his thumb over the spoked hinge of it, he watched the candlelight begin to shine against the wood, dancing orange and yellow across its surface. The frayed red ribbon tied there pooled in the palm of his hand. </p><p>He owed it to her to be the one to send off her final piece, he thought. It was the least he could do. She didn’t deserve to have her fan destroyed by the blade she had been created to battle.</p><p>
  <em>But… </em>
</p><p>With a private sigh, Sesshomaru snapped the fan shut, too distracted to notice how its weathered form seemed to be changing, as though his presence alone had breathed new life into it. He didn’t see how her red stripes brightened; how her yellowed paper whitened and a polished shine returned to her spokes. Instead, he simply set her beside the edge of his futon, laying out for the night and throwing his arm behind his head. His fur wound underneath him like a pillow, unleashed from its hidden state during the day. </p><p>Full of uneasy, conflicting thoughts, Sesshomaru closed his eyes and tried to find some clarity in sleep. </p><p>༻❁༺</p><p>But in his sleep, there was nothing but dreams.</p><p>Nothing but her wildflowers.</p><p>Nothing but her death.</p><p>Standing adrift in an ocean of flowers, floating between their bowing waves as they swayed with each shuddering breath of the wind, Sesshomaru’s past stirred with the fluttering white petals of Kagura’s death, and he stared at the ghost of her as she faded into wisps of purple smoke. Miasma curled black around her chest, tendrils of poison creeping out from around her heart, bleeding feather-light onto the wind—or perhaps, out into her. From one existence to the next. </p><p>Except in the next she would be free, and Naraku’s poisons could trouble her no longer.</p><p>Here he stood, lacking all his ornamentation of the past. While Kagura faded away in front of him, he felt his hand drift to where Tenseiga should rest at his hip—only to find nothing there, his claws closing around empty air. Still she smiled. Still she drifted further and further away from him, and he could do nothing to pull her back to shore.</p><p>“Are you leaving?” he heard himself say. Then, the wind had ruffled his empty sleeve, but now there was an arm there to still it, the hem of a blue robe catching about his striped wrist. Flower petals flew up to brush against his fingertips. </p><p>“Yes. Soon,” she said, and Sesshomaru wondered if she had known those would be her last words.</p><p>All she had been, all she could be—all of it, gone after she said those words.</p><p>Her body disintegrated. From purple to black to simply nothing. Just clear. Just free.</p><p>Just the wind.</p><p>Here in his dreamscape, there was no one to interrupt her final moments. No nagging half-brother to wonder after her. There was only the memory of her smile and the ruby eyes that had haunted him ever since.</p><p>He did not love her. But perhaps he could have, given time. And it was the could haves that haunted him;  the things that had been stolen from her. In her name he had raged—for everything that was and could have been.</p><p>Alone now in his dreamscape - aware, only distantly, that he was dreaming - Sesshomaru lingered in the memory of her smile. It could’ve been hours or seconds that he remained there, floating listless in the blurry sunlight of his dreams; he wasn’t sure. There was a warmth here that seeped beneath his skin, rippling deep down into the marrow of his bones until it settled, winding, spreading; testing the boundaries of himself until his sense of self became formless. He drifted towards the darkness of dreamless sleep, gusting out like the wind—</p><p>—until the wind itself spoke his name.</p><p>“This is what you dream about, Sesshomaru?”</p><p>He blinked and he was returned to the field. To the sunlight and the cold warmth. The soothing sensation that had engulfed him was now prickling, like claws probing through his skull at the back of his mind. In his veins his blood hardened, turning to granite beneath marble skin. He stopped breathing.</p><p>Behind him, around him, and above him, the wind laughed.</p><p>“I always wondered what it was like in that head of yours,” she said, ruffling through his hair. Flower petals flit through the air like summer fireflies, swirling around him in a drifting path. “I didn’t think it would be this.”</p><p>There was nothing to say. He turned where he stood, spotting a single feather that floated among the flurries of petals. It spun up about him, as though dancing on the breeze—twisting, spinning, and turning to a music that was far beyond his understanding. And soon it drifted down towards his outstretched hand, white tufts brushing against his fingers in a gentle caress. For a moment it stayed. Drifting. But then he watched it spin away—watched soar on the winds and stall in place, hovering in the open air where Kagura should be dying.</p><p>A sudden whirlpool of flower petals spun up to meet it, white and yellow and red, and like a cresting wave they crashed; falling in a sweep, dropping the curtain to reveal a goddess beneath.</p><p>Kagura stood before him as plainly as she had on the first day they’d met.</p><p>She was beautiful. Standing there in her field of flowers, she wore the delicate silks of her era, seeming as elegant here in his dreams as she had in life. Underneath a pale red kimono embroidered with white phoenixes, she wore a robe so pale it seemed like snow, decorated with the dark outlines of flower petals. Everything about her seemed pale, transient and ethereal. As though it was merely the idea of her standing before him — the reflection of a ghost in an unpolished mirror. </p><p>Yet still her eyes cut across time. Red and ruby, plain and honest, they cut through him now over the edge of her weathered fan.</p><p>“Kagura,” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. She snapped her fan shut and smiled.</p><p>“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” </p><p>When she looked at him, it felt as though he were losing his sense of self again, the very boundaries of his body threatening to falter and collapse—to lose shape and drift, like her winds, back through time. Back to the age of Naraku’s defeat and Rin’s short life. To her marriage and her children and her happiness, all allowed to flourish because Kagura had once made the choice to save Kohaku’s life over her own.</p><p>Rin haunted him now, too. In the lives of her daughters, and her daughter’s daughters, and their daughters. A bloodline that was slowly building towards a familiar name, a familiar shrine on a quiet hill…</p><p>All because of Kagura.</p><p>“I didn’t think anyone would find me,” she said softly. He tilted his head. “And of all people, I didn’t think it would be you.”</p><p>Were he awake, he might’ve pursued a better line of questioning. But he was not.</p><p>“Did you want to be found?”</p><p>She thought about this. The flowers around them rippled out in a wave, encouraged along by the gentle breeze. Against the dream-silver sun, her fan seemed whiter against her skin.</p><p>“By you?” she asked. </p><p>Sesshomaru said nothing. So she lingered in her own question, considering the answer for herself.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>༻❁༺</p><p>Like a dream that faded upon waking, Sesshomaru could not remember what they spoke about in the numb sunlight of his dreams. He remembered sitting. Propping his leg over a bent knee and watching the flowers bend and wave as she spoke, telling him about things that were too distant for recollection. It was a conversation they could not have enjoyed in life; and here in this blurry world, Sesshomaru was uncertain if they were sharing this moment at all. Was this simply a concoction of his tired mind, triggered by her fan and the reflection of himself in Kanna’s broken mirror? Or was it something more?</p><p>Did it even matter what it was?</p><p>He wasn’t considering those complexities when he found himself faced with her hips beneath his palms, her legs straddled over his. Unlike the rest of their time, this he remembered clearly: the casual way she approached him, speaking of past regrets as she combed her nails through his hair, pressing his bangs back and settling easily in his lap. Her red lips brushing against the crescent moon on his forehead, whispering all the confessions she’d been unable to reveal in life.</p><p>She had wondered about him, then. What they could be, if she could find her freedom. She’d never been able to tell if he’d cared for her. If he’d known how she felt.</p><p>He’d known, he said. At least how she felt about him. But he’d also known that he couldn’t entangle himself with anyone so close to Naraku, lest the beast try and take advantage of him again. But that hadn’t stopped him from raging after her death. From taking her murder as his own burden and avenging her himself.</p><p>“I know,” she said, and he felt the winds stir as they had when he’d resolved to master the meidou. Her hands traced feather-light paths over his shoulders, stripping him of his layers, gliding her fingertips over the scarred seam where his arm had regrown. He loosed her hair from its bun and it spilled resplendent down her shoulders, mahogany brown over fawn skin. Her jade earrings swayed aside when he pressed his mouth to the long lines of her neck and kissed her pulse. Despite his dreaming, he could taste her. <em>Feel </em>her. There was warmth beneath his hands, as soothing as a summer breeze. Her breath on his ear, her hands pulling apart his obi. </p><p>Her heart beating in her chest. </p><p>Desire pooled in his stomach, lightning bright and vast. With arousal making its steady course through his body, it wasn’t long before he found himself nude with her, resting underneath the blood orange skies of dusk. With her every breath, flower petals stirred about them. With every kiss on his brow, on his neck, on his mouth - her fingers curling beneath his jaw, tiling him up to her so she could drink him in, taste him for herself - she sparked a short eternity of heat in his bones, sending him listing into his own dizziness. Into her.</p><p>Kagura tasted like the cold chill of a winter wind and the soft caress of a springtime breeze. Like warm sunlight on a cloudy day. Like red and blue on black. Sesshomaru was too quick to find himself drunk on it, tracing the curves of her body with his claws and tongue in turn. Detached from his sense of self, he indulged in her. In the way her fingers drifted over the washboard of his abdomen, down lower to more prominent aches, to rising needs—</p><p>Sesshomaru sucked in a sharp breath when her fingers trailed long over him and she hummed, radiating warmth, placing a hungry kiss to his silver crown. Her hips rolled against his, dragging him slick between her folds, and he looked up at her from within the valley of her breasts. Their softness pillowed against the stripes emblazoned across his cheekbones.</p><p>There was nothing to say to one another. Ruby eyes met gold and she moaned softly when his hand found her breast, rolling her rosebud peak to a pebbled point between his fingers. He dragged his fangs over the other in turn. She called his name and it spilled out of her mouth like honey - <em>Sesshomaru </em>- dripping down into his chest and seeping through his blood and bones. Settling somewhere deep within his heart. </p><p>In that moment, he knew what could have been. What <em>should </em>have been. Devotion and loyalty and togetherness. Eternity. A relationship explored and consummated in the aftermath of her father’s darkness.</p><p>It was what they had now, here in his mind.</p><p>Or wherever they were.</p><p>She cried his name again when he entered her - when she sank down onto him - and she rode his hips with a desperate sort of abandon, gripping his arm tight and tangling her long fingers in his hair. His brow furrowed against her chest as her breasts heaved against his face, a sensual caress that had him biting and nipping to incite further whimpering. She was pliable. Open. Wet and wondrous, panting as she leaned into him. Shuddering against the hand that curved underneath her and encouraged her cantering pace atop him. Moaning at every grip and touch, every kiss and hungry bite.</p><p>His claws raked down the spider scar on her back and she shivered, quivering around him, moaning when he hauled her hips down as deeply as they could go. He bit out curses into her chest, drowning in their union.</p><p>And in that togetherness, he faded again. Lost his sense of self. But instead of drifting out, he drifted in; into her, completely. Into her beating heart, into her raging pulse, and into her mewling body. Until he found the undercurrent of her yoki, as wild and free as a hurricane’s gale—and thriving.</p><p>Alive, he thought.</p><p>
  <em>Awake. </em>
</p><p>Climax came and went in a rush of sensation, in a flurry of flower petals that fluttered up when he fell backwards into their calm waves. Laid out languidly on top of him, Kagura simmered beneath his touch as he trailed his claws along the silhouette of her form, her cheek pillowed against her forearms, crossed over his chest. They rested. They drifted.</p><p>Her yoki sparked against his own and he <em>wondered. </em></p><p>“Is this real?” he eventually asked. She tilted her face up to him and smiled thoughtfully, reaching aside a moment later to pluck her abandoned fan from the wildflowers. With an incredibly graceful maneuver, she opened it out alongside her, unfurling its spokes in the open air.</p><p>“It depends,” she murmured. Sesshomaru traced a stray tendril of her hair back behind her ear, feeling adrift again. The flower petals were spinning up around them. “Do you want it to be?”</p><p>Her gaze cut across to her fan and Sesshomaru followed that path, looking lazily on the red-and-white weapon that he had suddenly reappeared in his life. He observed it without recognition, at first. Without noticing how the world seemed to tunnel, converging entirely onto a single point of focus.</p><p>Onto her immaculate, snow white fan.</p><p><em>Yes</em>, he wanted to say; he wanted this to be real. He wanted to have her at his side, to watch her flourish in newfound freedom. For the first time in a very, very long time, He knew exactly what he wanted, and it almost seemed attainable.</p><p>Almost.</p><p>But before he could speak and breathe life into that possibility, her fan shuttered shut—and with it, their world crumbled.</p><p>༻❁༺</p><p>Sesshomaru’s eyes flew open.</p><p>The real world was far drearier than the landscape of his dreams. Bewildered by it and feeling out of sorts, he blinked against the dark of the night, sitting up and cradling his creased brow in one hand. He remembered himself; who he was, here and now, and who had been in his sleep.</p><p>Who he’d been with.</p><p>But like all dreams, it began to slip from him faster than he could remember it. Grappling with that fact, he clung to the clearest memories: to Kagura and her death, her reappearance, and her smile. Their joining among the flowers. Her fan.</p><p><em>Her fan, </em>he thought, and his hand was moving before he could think of anything else. He took the resting fan from where he’d laid it beside his head and lifted it, holding it up in the slitted stripes of moonlight that slanted in through the shuttered window.</p><p>It was as pristine as it should be. Immaculate. Unchanged. Unweathered. The blood and the water damage—all of it, gone; all miraculously erased. There was only the beautiful shine of its lacquered wood against the gleaming crescent moon. Its heavy weight in his palm. The hum of her yoki against his claws, buzzing between its closed spokes. A key piece of her imbued within the red-striped paper that had laid silent through the ages. </p><p>It was her consciousness. After so many years alone in the depths of a lake, forgotten, she had finally been prompted to wake. To mend her tattered remains with the power found beneath his skin.</p><p><em>“Well?” </em>the fan asked him. He could hear her in the furthest reaches of his mind, her consciousness dancing along the edges of his. The amused song of her voice traveled up from her weapon and into his palm, smoothing up the back of his hand to his forearm, to his elbow, across his bicep scar, and then over his shoulder into the lowest parts of his skull. Prickling. Taunting. Laughing.</p><p><em>“Do you want it to be?” </em>she asked again.</p><p>And the answer was simple.</p><p>“Yes.”</p>
<hr/><p>Artwork by <a href="https://hopidoodle.tumblr.com/">@hopidoodle:</a> "A Dream of Eternity"</p><p>
  
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  <a href="https://hopidoodle.tumblr.com/post/643108211765968896/a-dream-of-eternity-to-go-along-with-the">[View an equally beautiful SFW version here!]</a>
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